Are There Zombie Viruses In The Thawing Permafrost? (Source npr.org) Last summer, Zac Peterson was on the adventure of a lifetime. The 25-year-old teacher was helping archaeologists excavate a 800-year-old log cabin, high above the Arctic Circle on the northern coast of Alaska. They had pitched tents right on the beach. Over the course of a month, Peterson watched a gigantic pod of beluga whales swim along the beach, came face-to-face with hungry polar bear, invading their campsite, and helped dig out the skull of a rare type of polar bear. But the most memorable thing happened right at the end of the trip. “I noticed a red spot on the front of my leg,” Peterson says. “It was about the size of a dime. It felt hot and hurt to touch.” The spot grew quickly. “After a few days, it was the size of a softball,” he says.

When I finished writing this story in December, I ended it with a faint warning about the dangers of human curiosity. I was convinced that the only way “pathogens” would rise up from the permafrost was if a scientist bent over backward to resurrect the creatures in the lab. The chance of it happening naturally seemed infinitesimally small.

But then I received an email from Zac Peterson: “After kneeling in defrosted marine mammal goo … doctors treated me for a seal finger infection,” Peterson wrote. A photos showed a purplish, red infection, covering the front of his knee. 0pikSeal finger is a bacterial infection hunters contract from handling the body parts of seals. The infection can spread rapidly into the joints and bones. Sometimes people loose fingers and hands.